How the United States spies on us all

With an annual budget of $26.7 billion - as much as during the cold war - the American intelligence services are the best equipped in the world. Strategic alliances and powerful technology allow them to tap into the world’s telephones, faxes and electronic mail as a matter of routine. But the United States’ trump card is the cooperation it receives from the police and armed forces of other states more concerned with surveillance than with protecting individual liberties.

by Philippe Rivière

Is the United States now so powerful it no longer cares what its European “friends” think? It took dogged research by New Zealander Nicky Hager to uncover a huge world surveillance network, the Echelon system, in operation since the 1980s. His investigations (1) revealed in detail how one of (...)